Catherine Alix-Panabières,
Director of the Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Tumor Cells,
University Medical Centre of Montpellier
Dr Catherine Alix-Panabières received her PhD degree in 1998 at the Institute of Virology, University Louis Pasteur, in Strasbourg in France. In 1999, she moved to Montpellier where she did a postdoctoral research in the Department of Immuno-Virology of the University Medical Centre of Montpellier, France. During this last decade, Dr Alix-Panabières has focused on optimizing new techniques of enrichment and detection of viable disseminating tumor cells in patients with solid tumors. She is the expert for the EPISPOT technology that is used to detect viable tumor cells in the peripheral blood and the bone marrow of patients with breast, prostate, colon, head & neck cancer and melanoma. This technology has been recently improved to detect functional CTCs at the single cell level and is called EPIDROP. In 2010, she achieved getting a permanent position at the Hospital and at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier (MCU-PH), a wonderful mixture of giving teaching lessons to medical students on Cancer Biology in combination of developing this field of tumor cell dissemination at the hospital for the cancer patients, leading strongly translational clinical research. As an associate professor, she recently became the new director of the Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Cells (LCCRH) in the Department of Pathology and Onco-Biology. In this unique platform LCCRH, they isolate, detect and characterize circulating tumor cells using combinations of the EPISPOT assay, the CellSearch® system (Silicon Biosystem - Menarini), the flow cytometry, the CellCollector (GILUPI), the molecular biology (AmpliSpeed device), the Parsortix system (Angle) and the DEPArray (Silicon Biosystem - Menarini) for single cell sorting. She has authored or co-authored >60 scientific publications in this field during the last years including 10 book chapters, she is the inventor of three patents in the liquid biopsy field and she is part of French national projects: for ex, PANTHER (FUI project) as well as of big European projects: CTC-SCAN (Transcan project), CANCER-ID (IMI project) and European Liquid Biopsy Academy (ELBA, Marie-Curie project). After she got the Scientific Prize given by the Region Languedoc-Roussillon in 2008, it was a great honor for her to receive the Gallet et Breton Cancer Prize, the highest honor conferred by the French Academy of Medicine in November 2012 and, very recently, the 2017 AACR Award for the most cited scientific article in 2015 (Cayrefourcq et al. Cancer Res).
Functional Analyses of Circulating Tumor Cells in Cancer Patients
Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 11:45
Add to Calendar ▼2018-10-24 11:45:002018-10-24 12:45:00Europe/LondonFunctional Analyses of Circulating Tumor Cells in Cancer PatientsExosomes and Liquid Biopsies Europe 2018 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in blood are promising new biomarkers potentially useful for prognostic prediction and monitoring of therapies in patients with solid tumors including colon cancer. Moreover, CTC research opens a new avenue for understanding the biology of metastasis in cancer patients. However, an in-depth investigation of CTCs is hampered by the very low number of these cells, especially in the blood of colorectal cancer patients. Thus, the establishment of cell cultures and permanent cell lines from CTCs has become the most challenging task over the past year. We described, for the first time, the establishment of cell cultures and a permanent cell line from CTCs of one colon cancer patient (Cayrefourcq et al. Cancer Res. 2015). The cell line designated CTC-MCC-41 is in culture for more than three years and has been characterized at the genome, transcriptome, proteome and secretome levels. This thorough analysis showed that CTC-MCC-41 cells resemble characteristics of the original tumor cells in the colon cancer patient and display a stable phenotype characterized by an intermediate epithelial/mesenchymal phenotype, stem-cell like properties and an osteomimetic signature indicating a bone marrow origin. Functional studies showed that CTC-MCC-41 cells induced rapidly in vitro endothelial cell tube formation and in vivo tumors after xenografting in immunodeficient mice. More recently, we defined the molecular portrait of these metastasis-competent CTCs (Alix-Panabières et al. Clin Chem. 2017). These results highlight that CTC-MCC-41 line display a very specific transcription program completely different than those of the primary and metastatic colon cancer cell lines. Interestingly, among the 1,624 transcripts exclusively up-regulated in CTC-MCC-41 samples, key genes related to energy metabolism, DNA repair and stemness genes were observed. Such data may supply insights for the discovery of new biomarkers to identify the most aggressive CTC sub-populations and for the development of new drugs to inhibit metastasis-initiator CTCs in colon cancer. Moreover, the development of new immunotherapeutic strategies is of utmost importance. Antibodies against proteins that block the immune response of T-cells such as PDL1 have been approved for treatment of cancer patients after showing remarkable long-term remissions in subsets of patients. It is now important to develop predictive biomarkers to identify patients with the highest benefit from these therapies. In 2015, we could show for the first time that PD-L1 is heterogeneously expressed on CTCs from metastatic breast cancer patients (Mazel et al. Mol Oncol 2015). Further functional analysis of this interesting subset of CTCs might reveal special immunosuppressive properties.
Add to Calendar ▼2018-10-24 00:00:002018-10-26 00:00:00Europe/LondonExosomes and Liquid Biopsies Europe 2018Exosomes and Liquid Biopsies Europe 2018 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Add to Calendar ▼2018-10-24 11:45:002018-10-24 12:45:00Europe/LondonFunctional Analyses of Circulating Tumor Cells in Cancer PatientsExosomes and Liquid Biopsies Europe 2018 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
